Sunday, January 01, 2006

Two years of Findory

Tomorrow, January 2, 2006 will be the two year anniversary of when I launched Findory.com.

It has been great fun building Findory as it grows and grows. And Findory sure has been growing. Below is a graph of total viewed hits on Findory.com each quarter for the last two years:

"Viewed hits" means hits on the webservers excluding robots and redirects. Viewed hits in December 2005 was 4.5M, total hits 7.1M, viewed page views 3.2M, and total page views 5.9M.

Growth was 16% month-to-month in Q4 2005, a little slower than the growth rate earlier in the year, but still healthy growth. At that rate, Findory's traffic doubles every five months.

It is interesting to compare Findory's traffic levels with some related startups and websites. For one example, according to Alexa, Findory's traffic is roughly the same level as Rojo, Memeorandum, and MSN's Start.com.

When I finished the bookkeeping for this month, I was pleased to discover that Findory was also cash flow positive (by a few dollars) in December 2005. Fun milestone.

Including early work and prototypes before Findory.com launched, I have been working on Findory for about 2 1/2 years now. Running this scrappy, resource-starved, self-funded startup has been a remarkable experience, learning how to do everything from system administration to economical viral marketing to wading through legal goo. I look forward to what 2006 will bring.

14 comments:

Congrats on the great growth Greg. Nothing wrong with being cash-flow positive either!

Question regarding "hits": Are you using the traditional meaning of "hits", which would include basically any call made to your web servers including images, javascript files, etc? I assume not, since that's a pretty meaningless statistic, but unless I read the description wrong, that's what you're using. Page views and unique users would seem to be the graphs you'd want to show... and I'm sure both are equally impressive.

Hi, Mike. Yes, the graph is of hits. Hits includes image requests, etc.

Findory never has used a lot of images, Javascript, or other goo like that, so the hits are meaningful. You can see that because the hits aren't significantly higher than page views, 3.2M page views in Dec 2005 compared to 4.5M hits.

The main reason I'm reporting hits is that Findory moved to different boxes twice in 2004. The logs from those early boxes are in a different format, so hits are what is easily available for early 2004.